Elian represented more than youth to Miami's large Cuban community

And yet he embarked on a perilous, 90-mile voyage from Cuba to the United States. The 16-foot powerboat was overloaded. It sank, and 11 people drowned, his mother and her boyfriend among them.

But not Elian Gonzalez. Just 5 years old, he clung to an inner tube for two days. He would later say that dolphins danced around him, protecting him from harm as he floated, alone, in the Atlantic Ocean.

He was rescued appropriately enough on Thanksgiving Day.

"What a gift to find this kid today!" exclaimed Donato Dalrymple, one of two men out fishing who pulled him to safety, but not to tranquility.

Almost instantaneously, Elian was at the center of a whirlwind, engulfed by passions over freedom, over family and father's rights, over generations-old hatreds. If, over seven months, his voice was rarely heard he is just a small boy, after all multitudes spoke loudly.

There was his family in South Florida. We got to know them well, so well that a recent New Yorker cartoon depicted a roadside sign that read, "Welcome to Miami, home of the Miami relatives."

There was Lazaro, the great-uncle whose stucco house in Little Havana would be Elian's home for five months. And Marisleysis, the pretty 21-year-old cousin who embraced Elian as if he were her own child.

Within days, they sought asylum for him. They pampered him, cosseted him, took him to Disney World (with an entourage of 30, including family, journalists, security guards and sheriff's deputies).

Miami city officials, one of them dressed as Santa Claus, brought him a battery-powered dune buggy; he drove it gleefully around the yard.

It was a very small token of Cuban-American affection for Elian.His mother was a martyr, and his own survival was a potent symbol of their own undying opposition to Fidel Castro. They could not imagine sending him back.